Confessions of a Video Vixen

After reading this book my first reaction was that “she a recovering stupid hoe,” but at least she recovering. She spent her entire “professional” career basically sleeping with men for money and objects. Ironically this is no different from a lot of what goes on everywhere; she just did it on a larger scale. From what people told me about the book before I read it, I thought the entire book was about what famous people she slept with in the music industry, but it had a little be more than that.

The story starts in her childhood where she has a horrible relationship with her family and an even worse relationship with her mom. But quietly it was her best friend which indirectly accelerated the downward spiral. She convinced Karrine’s mom to allow her to go to the mall (which she had never been allowed to do before). Well, old girl lies to Karrine’s mom and has some boys pick them up form the mall. Long story short, Karrine gets raped, mom doesn’t believe her, and she runs away and starts stripping to support herself.

I wasn’t surprised to see that there were tragic and traumatic experiences that contributed to her adult behavior. She got caught in a cycle of needing to be needed, to feel important and wanted. She fulfilled this need through men and sex. To me, it was this cycle she was willing to repeatedly sell herself short. Not that her past makes her actions ok, but it kind of explains it. It was really messed up that everyone wanted to give her money and things when she was on a high, but when she really needed it most everyone turned their back. Not that her past makes her actions ok, but it kind of explains it.

Something I did find interesting was about the feature girls and the artists on the video sets. My understanding of what she wrote, most feature girls for larger videos were hired for the video through some sort of model/actress agency. In fact, the main girls were said to only interact with the artist during a shot, and looked down on them in general for the way they treated/portrayed women. She states that the other girls despised Karrine because not only was she too friendly with the artist, she was willing to wear and do things the other girls refused to do. She wasn’t professional.

With the ongoing debate about hip-hop and it’s portrayal on women, I think that those sections of the book send a good message to aspiring models/actresses, a message that sex is not the only way to make it big in the industry. But still the video’s image of women does play a major role in how we treat them in everyday life and how our sisters and daughters grow up. Not everyone has been informed that those images are just that, images. Men find it ok to disrespect our women and women are brain washed to believe it’s not disrespect; and we’re both contributing to the black community’s plague.